The present invention relates to computing system state communication and, more specifically, to systems and methods for externally communicating a state of a computing system when the computing system is in a low functioning state.
There are several circumstances in which a computing system is unable to communicate to external resources. The operating system (OS) may be barely functional because it is failing or beginning to initialize. Failures can include, but are not limited to, a communications software failure, a recovery operation that prevents preemption, a full communication stack that cannot queue more, the OS is crashing or shutting down for a variety of reasons. In addition the underlying hardware of the system can experience failures in both hardware and embedded software. Failures can include, but are not limited to, a failure of hardware or the input/output subsystem.
System automation monitors a platform running applications. System automation is responsible to keep those applications running even in the case of underlying failures. Automation systems require that various processors, such as a service processor and various other distributed processors, and the OS be able to communicate their state even when they are not online and available. Without this information automation system applications do not have accurate information of the state of the processor and the OS and can make decisions that may be incorrect.